The New York Times Book Review is considered by many to be the gold standard in book reviews (to quote a nameless author we interviewed: "You only know you made it when you're inside there"). And reaching over 1.7 million people every week, The New York Times Book Review is not only the most high-profile, but also the most read book review publication in the country. The Knight News recently spent a day in their office and spoke with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor-in-chief.
Michael Orbach: Okay, first question: How does the New York Times Book Review work? How do books get chosen? How do reviewers get chosen?
Sam Tanenhaus: Gallies and advance reading copies come in every day. Every week, the three of us: Bob Harris, the deputy [editor]; Dwight Garner the senior editor and I distribute them among the preview editors. Each of us may hold on to some. Dwight does a lot of fiction and all the poetry books; Bob does adventure books and I'll look at some histories, sometimes fiction and a range of things that happens to interest me. But the rest are distributed to the five preview editors. They spend time with the books and a couple of weeks later will report back individually [and] meet with the three of us. They decide what books we'll review.
That's something people don't understand when they wonder why there is more fiction, why isn't more fiction, why are there are more serious books, why there aren't more serious books; that has nothing to do with me, really. I decide what goes on the cover, how long a piece we might do, but as far as selection of books go, that is really made by the preview editors. Then, in that meeting where they tell us what books should be reviewed, they'll also propose names of reviewers and we may have a conversation and have other ideas. That will also depend on the length of the review we want, although sometimes that will also be dictated by the byline; if you're asking John Updike to review a book you're going to give him as much space as he thinks he needs. That's an extreme example. But often we will adjust the assignment to particular reviewers. Some excellent reviewers are happy to write short; some need more space and in a particular case where we think we have a really unusual match-up or exceptional contributor, someone we think doesn't often appear in our pages, that we've been following, we'll try to give him more room.
That's how we decide, and the previewers themselves are evaluating each book individually, but in the context of their sometimes alarmingly complete knowledge of what else there is. If a writer is not bringing something new to the conversation or is not very well-established with a following, long-awaited book, or has really superb narrative or analytical skills, there's a good chance the book won't get reviewed. The same applies with variations to every book we do. There are a lot of books on Darwin and religion; we can't review everyone. There are many first novels; we can't review them all. For a first novel to be reviewed it has to seem strikingly good; that's always been the case and that always will be. It's unfortunate, but that's how we do it.
MO: I know this question is always brought up: Why is more non-fiction covered in the book review than fiction? I know you've answered that there's simply more non-fiction than fiction…
ST: Yes, that's one reason. Another is that if you look at a publication like the New York Review of Books, or the New Republic, or the New Yorker, those are the publications that we probably look at mostly, mistakenly perhaps, you'll see most of them overwhelmingly are covering non-fiction because there's more of it published. We're also not only in the business of reviewing books, but presenting what we hope will be interesting journalism to readers. It is easier to get a good piece of analysis and writing, a better essay, a better report, whatever you think a book review of being, on non-fiction than fiction. Novels and short stories are very hard to write about. There are few really strong fiction reviewers around and their standards are very high. Because what happens is, even though many of the reviews we run are mixed, and very few are raves, probably more pans than raves, almost every book we send out, we think is pretty good. We send a novel or a short story [collection] out to a critic because we think it's good and yet the review will often be harsh.
Why is that? Because the critics read them even more critically than we do. If you give a book to a great critic like James Wood or Tony Scott, they see into the machinery of a book, they see all the other novels that it sounds a little bit like, all the influences. What happens is if you send out a lot of mediocre fiction, what you're going to end up doing is publishing a lot of harshly negative reviews of authors no one's ever heard of, and it doesn't seem fair to have a first-time novelist who will get slammed in the pages of the Book Review. We don't really see the purpose of that.
MO: On that some note and moving towards a damning question, what constitutes original fiction? I know there's no real answer to this question. I was reading Rachel Donadio's essay on African fiction in the New York Times Magazine - is there a place where you can label the new growth for fiction?
ST: That's a good question. We're going to look into that ourselves; we are doing a spring issue on translation, global fiction, and that's what we're going to try to see. Now, if you look closely at Rachel's piece, she has some pretty clear ideas of where South African fiction is now and you should ask her about that. [Editor's Note: We did, look at the sidebar.] Where is the interesting fiction coming from? I think something that really interests me is this: ne reason we're using this word 'global,' not to sound like Larry Summers or Bill Clinton, [is] you have this wave of people who are not native-born Americans or Brits, who are revitalizing English; or maybe they've grown up or lived here but they've got whole different cultural knowledge. Like Kiran Desai. It's interesting to see how they revitalize the language.
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